The streets of London in December 1952 were choked with smog. In Dominick Donald’s remarkably accomplished debut novel Breathe (Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99), they are also stalked by a serial killer, one who has been quietly plying his trade since the blitz and is now preying on those left vulnerable in the current peasouper. Probationary constable Dick Bourton, trying to make a new life for himself after the horrors of the Korean war, is landed with the Notting Dale beat, the “division’s scruffiest end ... poor, creaky, full of minor villainy and generations of grudges”. Trudging through this west London area that is “all Scotch mist and glistening roofs … If you found the right spot you could almost be a lookout in a crow’s nest, bobbing above a fog-bound fishing fleet”, he stumbles upon the body of a man, which leads him, indirectly, into the path of the murderer.

Bourton is at the bottom of the police food chain, though, and must deal with the scepticism of his superiors. “Six years of coppering, I’ve never known a mystery,” he’s told by one. Plagued by nightmares of the war, worrying about the arrival of his White Russian fiancée, a woman he hasn’t seen for over a year, Bourton is the most appealing, original protagonist I’ve read for some time, and Donald’s depiction of the city’s thickening gloom is splendidly evocative, bringing the stench of London’s coal fires to vivid life. “First pea-souper of the winter … you can feel it on your skin,” Bourton is advised. “Nights like tonight, they all come out … Burglars, cosh artists, spivs shifting wholesale. Car thieves. Con-men even, ’cos everyone’s at home and susceptible to a hard-luck story on a foggy night.” It may be “coppering in the smog” but this is utterly fresh. A very impressive debut.

Nestled in the Peak District, the village is home, as one character mourns, to 'our fair share of horrible crimes'

Amer Anwar’s Brothers in Blood (Dialogue Books, £7.99) moves the action a little farther west, to London’s Southall, and forward to the present day. The novel, which won Anwar the Crime Writers Association’s Debut Dagger for the best unpublished writer, is the story of Zaq Khan, who is not long out of prison, and working at a builders’ yard, when he is roped into finding his boss’s missing daughter, Rita. Khan is keen to stick to the straight and narrow since his release from jail, but is blackmailed into taking on the search, only to discover – after suffering repeated beatings – that Rita might have had good reason to go missing, and that he might not want to help her be found.

Set in Southall’s Asian community, where “everyone knew everyone else … Forget six degrees of separation, in Southall it was down to one or two”, Brothers in Blood is an enjoyable, fast-paced quest for the truth with a likable, relatable protagonist. Zaq has a heart of gold, and apart from being good with his fists is refreshingly normal for a thriller hero (he’s forever getting stuck in traffic; Brothers in Blood is practically a roadmap to Southall, its traffic black spots and parking restrictions). Recommended.

Sarah Ward’s new DC Connie Childs novel, The Shrouded Path (Faber & Faber, £12.99), opens in 1957, as six teenage girls walk into a railway tunnel near a Derbyshire village but only five walk out.

Almost 70 years later, the fallout of what the girls did that day is still playing out, and Childs is drawn into it by a series of seemingly unconnected deaths in and around the fictional Derbyshire village of Bampton. Nestled in the Peak District, the village is home, as one character mourns, to “our fair share of horrible crimes”.

Another reliably good thriller from Ward, in which she carefully picks apart the layers of female friendship to reveal a nasty heart.

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